You’ve Been Guttmacher’d: Planned Parenthood’s Baby

Anytime journalists feel the need to reinforce unexamined Planned Parenthood statements, they pull the Guttmacher card. The Guttmacher Institute, founded by former Planned Parenthood President and former Vice President of the American Eugenics Society, Alan F. Guttmacher, is continually lavished with misleading credentials by mainstream media.

NPR and the Washington Post call it a “nonpartisan research group”. ABC and CNN refer to Guttmacher’s abortion activist staff as “researchers”. USA Today calls the public policy organization a “non-profit group that studies reproductive and sexual health”.

Where are all of the easy pejoratives like “extreme” or “anti-choice” and “partisan”? They’re just much easier to affix to groups like mine, The Radiance Foundation, that present the empirical evidence while opposing the destruction that abortion brings.

The Guttmacher Institute was birthed in 1968 as a research arm of Planned Parenthood. In the late 70s, for public relations and credibility issues, both organizations performed a public separation declaring that Guttmacher was no longer affiliated with Planned Parenthood (PPFA) in any way.

But the cord is still attached.

Despite this preposterous claim by Guttmacher’s President and CEO, Sharon Camp, this global pro-abortion extension of PPFA has been funded over $2.1 million by Planned Parenthood from 2004-2009. In an interview with CUNY TV (see embedded video below), originally aired on December 15, 2010, Camp claims, “for the past 4 or 5 years, Guttmacher has been completely unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood.” Yet a quick look at the nation’s largest abortion chain’s 990 tax filings (click image at right to enlarge), reveals how “completely unaffiliated” Guttmacher has been. Planned Parenthood, who receives over $360 million annual tax dollars, gave $2,142,076 of our tax dollars to their “research” arm, Guttmacher.

That’s a lot of unaffiliation! Most of us would love to be “unaffiliated” with large organizations with over $1 billion in asset, as long as it’s not PPFA of course. The corporate memo apparently didn’t get to PPFA as it listed Guttmacher, in its 2007 tax filing, as an “Independent Affiliated Organization”. Camp shows how pliable words can be; “unaffiliated” is a relative term just as the supposed “scientific research” Guttmacher provides for reproductive health issues.

This is the ongoing challenge with “reproductive rights” organizations. Truth doesn’t matter. Even easily provable things, like an organization’s ties with another, are distorted because the defense of abortion requires pathological behavior rooted in deceit.

Our society’s understanding of the current efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which is not synonymous with defunding Title-X funded health facilities, has been profoundly and negatively impacted. Thanks to decades of indoctrination and obfuscation, most people have no idea who and what Planned Parenthood is. Mainstream media will not provide any scrutiny of the exaggerated claims of PPFA affiliates while Guttmacher has become the established authority despite voluminous contradictions and distortions (e.g. Guttmacher’s claim that “abortion services are concentrated in cities” then later reports, with no raw data, that abortion clinics are not mostly located in urban areas). Many journalists simply parrot what Guttmacher claims in dissonance-filled defenses of its parent organization.

So be aware when you’ve been Guttmacher’d. It blindsides you with alarming yet unqualified statistics (full of self-citations) and convincing buzzwords like “scientific” and “comprehensive”. When Guttmacher’s CEO cannot grasp simple math, like the difference between zero and $2.1 million, everything else should become suspect.

It’s ironic, though understandable, that the Guttmacher Institute’s umbilical cord hasn’t been cut. Planned Parenthood apparently still values the child it’s given birth to and wouldn’t dare end its life regardless of viability.